Poet Melvin B. Tolson, subject of movie The Great Debaters. (Image credit: US Library of Congress)

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were.

In fact, until the beginning of the 21st century, many people (if not most) defined the Harlem Renaissance primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all. The Great Debaters corrects both oversights by providing an extraordinary portrait of poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966), portrayed with convincing restraint by Denzel Washington, who also directed the movie. At the same time, it delivers an exciting story filled with the creative intellectual genius that characterized the Harlem Renaissance, the thrill of youthful romance, and the painful loss of innocence.

Artis not barrel copper easily separatedfrom the matrix;it is not fresh tissues—for microscopic study--one may fix;unique as the white tiger’spink paws and blue eyes,Artleaves her lover as a Komitasdeciphering intricate Armenian neums,with a wild surmise.

(From the poem "Delta" as published in Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999)

Tolson, History, and Hollywood

Tolson, historically, is known largely as the celebrated author-poet of Rendezvous with America (1944), Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), and Harlem Gallery (1965). But we meet him in The Great Debaters, prior to his literary fame, as a professor of English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas.

By day he teaches and guides his students through the passion-filled topics of the era: labor rights, race relations, public welfare policies, and personal ethics. By night, he is a labor organizer who runs the risk of imprisonment, or of getting lynched, when he meets with Whites and Blacks to convince them to organize unions to protect their rights as workers. His efforts cause him to become branded as a communist, and therefore distrusted as a threat not merely to labor laws (or the lack of any significant ones at the time) but to American democracy.

Brilliant Student Debaters

Nate Parker as Henry Lowe, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Samantha Brooke, and Denzel Whitaker as 14-year-old James Farmer, Jr. all give inspired performances in their roles as Tolson’s brilliant student debaters who endure challenge after challenge before earning an invitation to debate the team at Harvard.

With the odds stacked solidly against them, they nevertheless pull off an historical win. Just as significant as the team’s final triumph, is the footnote identifying these students as future community leaders and history-makers in their own right. Henry Lowe would go on to become an influential minister, Samantha Brooke a lawyer, and Farmer one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

A Meeting of Two Iconic Talents

Much has been made of the fact that The Great Debaters was the first major film project on which media empress Oprah Winfrey (one of the film’s producers) and two-time Oscar-winner Denzel Washington worked together. Of equal significance, if not greater, is the fact that in addition to Washington, the movie features powerhouse Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker as Dr. James Farmer, Sr. How many movies are there, after all, in which two Academy Award-winning African-American actors play characters of historical consequence like Tolson and Farmer?

More important than the novelty is the contrast between the two, somewhat like the classic divergence noted later between Martin Luther King Jr.’s political philosophies and those initially espoused by Malcolm X. The differences between Tolson and Farmer, however, appear more subtle and that very likely is due to Robert Eisele’s amazing screenplay. Whitaker’s performance is thrown into an even more refined relief by that of Kimberly Ellise, who plays his wife.

The hype and buzz surrounding The Great Debaters upon its initial release often came across as a bit over the top. Despite that, the movie is actually far more excellent than anything you’ve likely heard about it.

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Author-Poet Aberjhani

Supporter of principles advocated by PEN American Center and the Academy of American Poets, Aberjhani is also the Choice Academic Title Award-winning co-author of the world's first Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.